This proposal seeks to investigate the nature and neurological organization of language-based communicative capacities. It continues the investigator's long-standing aim to provide a detailed functional analysis of language processing in real-time. Studies are aimed at discovering how language comprehension is organized in the brain at the lexical, sentential (structural), and discourse levels. Normal and aberrant processing is examined at each level with consideration of effects of aberrant processing at one level on another. Ten series of experiments are proposed, two at the lexical level, five at the sentential level, and three at the discourse level. These studies are designed to provide a window on a wide range of language processes and how they interact and support one another (or fail to). The guiding hypothesis is that focal brain damage can disentangle cognitive subsystems that normally are inextricably intertwined by examining on-line moment by moment changes in activation, usually of lexical items, under manipulation of differing lexical, structural, or discourse factors.